WORK! Episode 2

People are mad online about my hot take on the Spotify billboard

All right. Welcome back to work.

For the slow learners: We talk about life at work. We talk about being great at work. We talk about messing up at work. We talk about when things go wrong with work. It’s terrible and fun and thought provoking and also stupid. Just like work.

I'm deep into the Lord of the rings trilogy. I realize that I'm 100 years late. I love it. Peter Jackson is a fucking genius.

There's a whole bunch of things you can learn about work from Lord of the Rings. The biggest one is that work is a journey.

Journeys suck and are awesome (mostly because a lot of the parts suck)

We just got out of a tech review. We hired these tech consultants, and this morning was a state of the state on our technology.

I kept thinking about Frodo during our call (#weirdo) because our tech, like everything else here, is a journey. One of the hardest things about work is that journey. The journey is harrrrrrd.

I'm struggling because we have so much to fix at Food52, and I'm not talking about little things related to tech. I’m talking about big things. Sometimes the hardest thing to see is the biggest picture. In this case - what is worth fixing and why? What’s the stuff that helps you along the way versus the stuff that just swirls you into oblivion?

Sometimes I can get lost in all of the fixing.

All the fixing of yourself, all of the fixing of your job, all the fixing of your relationships…all of it…it’s never ending. Never ending to the point where I become consumed by the fixing and I forget why I’m fixing everything in the first place.

Does this ever happen to you?

Back to this meeting. My net takeaway is - God, I don't want to get lost in all the iterative progress.

I want to make progress, but I really want progress to accomplish something greater.

This feels like big thing that everybody tackles in their life and with their career: What to fix, why, what not to and how not to get lost in all the fixing.

When we zoomed out in our tech review we asked - what are we actually trying to achieve?

Sounds dumb but is so necessary. When you put things in that framework, everything falls away - all the stuff that you shouldn't be doing, falls away. And the stuff that is really important becomes very apparent. This is clarifying. Like a facial for your work. Extractions included.

So that's the the theme of today's episode: figuring out what's important, figuring out where you should put your energy, figuring out where your time is best spent…This is one of the most important exercises you can take on at work.

Every Monday Jess and I go through my calendar. Sometimes I take a step back and say - what the fuck am I doing all week? What is this adding up to? Which of these meetings are pivotal to getting us to the place we want to go and to the company we want to be?

And which of it is just a waste of time?

Collect What You Find

My tip going into the week is collecting what you find on social.

I don't know what's happening in my feed but it's full of hacks. Home hacks. Cooking hacks. Cleaning hacks. Creator hacks. I’m saving all of them especially the AI ones. Cooking is a lost cause let’s be honest.

I'm making myself a list of all the pieces of AI technology, whether it's ChatGPT, Gamma, Leonardo - whatever. Everybody could benefit from teaching themselves about AI.

I had this bananas conversation yesterday where someone was like, you're going to ruin the Food52 photography with AI.

Sidenote: I'm not going to fucking ruin the Food52 photography with AI. (No really).

But any person thinking about visual merchandizing, anybody thinking about design, anyone thinking about content creation right now has to understand the role that technology plays in order to understand what the potential of said technology could or might be.

I'm carving out time in my schedule to be a student and make time in particular to be a student of AI.

If I had any piece of advice for anybody in the workforce in 2025, it is to make time to be a student of AI.

It's not AI that's going to put people out of jobs, it’s people who can use AI. #cliche

I found something yesterday about an AI that helps you write decks, and I'm like, God, if I could just actually stop scribbling images on paper for strategies and have a bot or piece of technology do that for me, I would be so much more efficient.

AI: It’s a Lucky Break Moment

So speaking of current events - obviously AI is everywhere in the news. You see DeepSea doing what ChatGPT did with millions of dollars for $5 million. Yikes.

There's going to be this arms race around AI.

It's only going to get more pervasive.

It's only going to become - I would argue - more sinister.

But long story short, AI isn't going anywhere. And it's really the question is can humans keep control of it, and how do humans put it to use?

One of the biggest things I'm seeing in the workforce is that people are afraid of AI.

I think they don't understand it which is to be expected (I obviously don’t understand it - I’m slogging thru writing this thing on my phone on the train when obviously a bot should do it).

What’s unfortunate, is that people diminish and disparage what they don't know and understand and AI is no exception.

Don't get me wrong, there's plenty to criticize about AI, and I think that will become more apparent as we move into the future.

Look at the arc of Mark Zuckerberg. Is he evil or not right now (he’s decidedly evil and beyond creepy) Is Sam Altman evil or not Right now? TBD.

What I do know is that just like the when the internet showed up and everybody shit on it and then it took over and everybody got in line…the same thing is happening with AI.

I remember working at Fidelity for this lady named Joanne (not my Joanne - different Joanne) Joanne was a print buyer and smoked like 6000 cigarettes a day and went to martini lunches all week. She was awesome, but she loved print and she was like, “I can't be bothered with the internet. I don't understand the internet. The internet is a terrible, dark, dirty, gross, disgusting little place.”

Flash forward to now - the biggest vehicle for marketing for Fidelity Investments is obviously digital. So for me, getting the chance to work in the internet way back in 1999 was a lucky break because I got into something at an early stage. If you’re early, you have the advantage. Simple.

We are at a lucky break moment with AI.

People harnessing AI will be the most successful. And if you’re older and it doesn’t come so natural, you’ve got to dig deep and teach yourself how to use it.Don't be scared of it. Don't diminish it. Don't disparage it. Use it and be ok with feeling dumb or overwhelmed or insignificant by it.

People Are Mad Online About My Hot Take on the Spotify Billboard.

Spotify has a billboard In New York that says, “Our employees aren’t children, Spotify will continue working remotely”